Gordon Brown was today forced to deny that he is twenty third out of twenty three in the cabinet 'pecking order'. A former Labour Foreign Secretary has suggested that it was unacceptable for a Prime Minister to be so low down.

A number of Westminster commentators have noticed that the PM has been keeping a much lower profile of late, allowing senior ministers such as Lord Mandelson to take centre stage. This has often led to the suggestion that he is not really in control of the government.

"It is important to realise," said the PM, "that just because I am a discredited Chancellor and an unpopular and unelected Prime Minister and just because I am propped up by an unelected deputy and have elevated more people to the Lords (in order to fill my cabinet) than any other PM, and just because a large number of Labour MPs want me to go, and just because I mishandled the expenses scandal, the Lisbon treaty, the 10p tax and public sector borrowing... just because of all those things... it does not mean that I'm low down the pecking order."

The US investment bank Morgan Stanley caused outrage today when it published a research note written by a senior citizen suggesting that Twitter is rarely used by "people over the age of one hundred".

The head of the bank's European Media team decided that "the old fellow knew what he was talking about  - for once." He then went on to claim that the old man's research note was "one of the clearest and most thought-provoking insights we have seen – so we published it"

The geriatric, a Mr. Murdoch, who is a veteran of Arpanet, the internet's predecessor, claimed, "Twitter is useless. It is a moronic and monosyllabic means of communicating, and anyway, I am much, much too old to use a keyboard anymore. My fingers are awfully stiff even when I put the ointment on them. Furthermore, all my friends are dead, so I have no-one to tweet, but even if I did, I wouldn't tweet, so there. When my grandchildren ring me up and ask me whether I have seen their latest tweets, I always tell them that I did not know what these silly 'tweets' were that they were sending me, and so I probably threw them all in the bin... assuming, that is, that I actually remember whatever question it is that they have asked me in the first place. Which I probably don't."

Research shows that the number of teenagers illegally sharing music has fallen dramatically in the past year. Apparently less than a third of teenagers are illegally downloading music.

A record industry spokesman said, "We are delighted. These figures challenge the idea that illegal filesharing will continue to grow."

What appears to have happened is that the record industry has cunningly bored audiences into submission. What it does is it takes on untalented teenagers who cannot sing but are easy on the eye, turns them into a clones of previous teenage pop stars who also cannot sing but have sold records, then it produces a formulaic soundtrack that sounds suspiciously like something that you might have heard before.

The spokesman continued, "The audience eventually gets bored with this rehash of something that was pretty vacuous in the first place and, hey presto people stop illegal downloading.... Wicked!"

A famous philosopher has told newspapers that he is having trouble deciding which famous philosopher will help him get both mad and even.

The philosopher went 'ballistic' when a reviewer in New York panned his latest book, 'Proust Won't Make You Go Blind', calling it self-serving, pseudo-intellectual garbage.

"I can get no satisfaction from either Nietzsche or Schopenhauer. I'm thinking of calling time on philosophy as a way of dealing with life. I am now thinking, either I should punch the guys lights out or just sit at home simmering and sticking pins in a wax effigy of him."